Isildur:Makh: JudgeMuttonChops: to quote a farker from a recent thread..

"Bear, with paws extended.Dog, with plate of broccoli."

When the walls fell. I actually understand what you said there.

I can't be the only one sometimes bugged by the fact that they clearly had a base language without metaphor they were using, upon which they based the circuitous metaphor language. They could say "wall" without resorting to "Kagra, his spackling knife in hand" and so on, going through an endless recursive process of breaking more direct signifiers into examples or metaphors.

Even worse, perhaps, is that essentially their language was just a bunch of nouns. They had no verbs, adjectives, pronouns, or anything else you would need to make a real language. As an experiment, try speaking using only nouns for a day and see how well you'd do.

Not to mention, there's no reason why a Star Trek universal translator would have had any special problem with their language anyway. So, for example, in Tamarian, "Temba, his arms wide/open" means "a gift." In Spanish, "un regalo" means "a gift." To a translation program seeing Spanish and Tamarian for the first time, "un regalo" is just four meaningless syllables, and "Temba, his arms wide" is just five meaningless syllables. For all practical purposes "Temba, his arms wide" is just a single word. Learning that it means "a gift" in no way depends or even benefits from recognizing that "Temba" was the name of a person.

I mean, it was a cool episode, but the whole "The universal translator can't figure out their language" bit was just as contrived as "Ionization in the atmosphere prevents the transporters from working!"